Andy Woodruff

Rough, uneven ink

In addition to shapes being imperfect, I want the ink from the imagined pen or printing press to be a little uneven. My standard approach for lines or polygon outlines is to use a standard simple line combined with a marker line made up of the "line" marker, where each marker has some random variation in length and width.

Point marker symbols can be made more rough, too, by adding two or three strokes that have different stroke styles—dot line, dash line, etc.

Paper textures

The map canvas itself can have some imperfection, too, hinting at things like the texture of paper or aged, fading ink. I like to try textures as vector styles, rather than raster images, because everything is contained in the QGIS project and there are fewer assets to keep track of. Here are a few tips.

• Random marker fills can be used for textures, for example a paper grain texture made from a random marker fill with "line" simple markers and a bit of random rotation.
• For a texture or effect covering the whole map, make a new polygon temporary scratch layer, and choose inverted polygons as its symbol type. The layer will appear as a polygon covering the map canvas, which you can style for texture effects. It will still be there if you change the map extent, and if you save the project and come back later.
• Use low opacity and blending modes like multiply and screen (depending on the desired effect) for subtle textures that overlay the entire map.
• For a faded look, do something like the "painty" fill described above (a blurred point pattern fill) with a light color.

Coastlines and water bodies are some of the most striking elements in old-timey maps, being both decorative and functional: they have an important job of providing figure-ground contrast when things weren't so simple as clicking on different fill colors.

Coastal hatching—parallel lines emanating from coastlines—is common in a certain type of antique map, and is especially useful as a kind of shadow to create some figure-ground contrast between land and water when color fills aren't an option. My version of it is done as a point pattern fill in buffered polygons, with a lot of randomization to make it look roughly sketched. There's a lot of room to tone down the randomness and still achieve a hand-drawn look here.

If you're using color, this pairs well with a kind of glow or shadow, like the darker blue seen under the hatching in the above screenshot.

You can probably find a million articles and tutorials on this—basically just a series of buffers—but I'll mention my own tip anyway. You can make a multi-ring buffer with a geometry generator as in the example below. And by using an exponent or other fancy math in the buffer distance, you can have the space between lines get progressively larger as they get farther out to sea, if desired.

collect_geometries( # group results from below into a multipolygon
  array_foreach(
    # for an array from 1 to 15...
    generate_series( 1, 15),
    # ...make a buffer for each distance (pixels)
    buffer($geometry, @element ^ 1.4)
  )
)

In my style, I've also split that into a few sets of buffers, so that each group can have a thinner line style as they get farther from land.

Lakes can be styled much the same as coastlines, based on negative distance buffers,but for hatching the process is a bit more complicated. That style looks best if it's underneath a land layer. With lake polygons, that means you need a separate polygon layer above for land—with lakes cut out of it. You could do this either by duplicating the lakes layer and styling it as inverted polygons—but bear in mind this will also cover everything including oceans if the coast is within the map extent—or by creating the "land minus lakes" layer by running the difference geoprocessing tool using the land and lakes layers.

If your map includes both lakes and ocean, putting it all together may require more than a couple of layer styles. The layers might look like this, for example, from bottom to top:

1. Land styled for coastal effect (e.g. hatching)
2. Lakes with a fill and shore effects
3. Land (minus lakes) again with a fill style
4. Lakes again styled with a lakeshore outline
5. Land again with a coast outline

Stippling

I've seen stippling on water in both modern and old-timey maps, and it's pretty straightforward in QGIS with fill styles, but here are a couple of tips (these apply to any stipping, not just water!):

• You'd think that a random marker fill is perfect for this, but often I find random fills to be, well, too random, with conspicuous clusters and empty spaces. Instead I prefer a point pattern fill with some randomize pattern distances (half the pattern spacing, or so), ensuring more uniform coverage—which I think a human cartographer would strive for—while still appearing random.
• If you want stippling that fades out away from shore, use a series of rings with increasing distance from shore and fill them with patterns of decreasing density. That means several geometry generators that look something like this: difference($geometry, buffer($geometry, -5)), difference($geometry, buffer($geometry, -10)), difference($geometry, buffer($geometry, -15)). Note that these rings overlap each other, which I think is helpful for smoothing the transitions in density

Combine color and texture

As color was not part of the printing process for many antique maps, it was also sometimes optional. If you were a fancy, wealthy person you might buy a colored version, but if you were a regular (well, also wealthy) person you might buy an uncolored version. This is to say, the map needed to work without color, so color should be in addition to lines, pattern fills, etc. I have no particular practical tip or style to show here; it's just something to keep in mind!

Downloads

Okay, now that you've suffered through my explanations, or simply skipped them, here's what you probably came for: styles to download and try for yourself! I hope that you can use these as a starting point for your own styles, editing the colors, sizes, etc. to suit your needs.

Two caveats:

• Certain aspects of a layer style, like layer opacity or blending mode, or whether something needs to be done as inverted polygons, are not part of the symbols themselves and you'd need to apply those yourself
• I've generally used pixels as the unit for everything, as these are intended for digital images exported straight from QGIS. (In fact I can make no promises that any of this will export correctly to, say, SVG.)

To use these styles in QGIS, import them with the style manager. See instructions for importing styles in QGIS documentation. After you've imported the symbols, they'll appear in a layer's symbology panel, where you can simply click one to apply it to your layer. Filter by the tag hand_drawn_styles to find them more easily.

Images and symbols

I've always done my best to imitate hand-drawn cartography without, well, drawing anything, hence all the convoluted vector styles I've gone through above. But there's no way around it: a hallmark of certain times and places in cartography is hand-drawn imagery and symbols. Ranges of mountains, towns, trees, animals, and more that represent the character of the land. Hacking these together from weird point symbols isn't going to cut it. We're going to need some drawings.

Alas... this is a topic for another day, as assembling image symbols and vector layers into a map that looks real is something I'm still learning.

For now, I'll point you to the work of author K. M. Alexander, whose incredible fantasy map brushes project provides a lot of image assets extracted from actual antique maps. Grab some PNGs and be sure to buy him a coffee!